Life at the Threshold: Emerging Biomedical Technologies, Religion, and Health Practices

Emerging biomedical technologies, including AI-driven health systems, genetic screening and editing, and assisted reproduction, are reshaping how societies understand the body, health, kinship, and the boundaries of life itself. Religious traditions, secular bioethics, medical authorities, patients and publics actively negotiate what these technologies should mean and how they should be governed.

This session explores these transformations by focusing on both institutional and lived dimensions, while attending to how they are shaped by gendered norms, inequalities, and embodied experiences. On the one hand, we examine the moral work through which these actors legitimize, regulate, or contest emerging technologies. On the other, we analyse how individuals and communities navigate these innovations in their bodies, treatments, and biographies, mobilizing religious meanings and experiential knowledge.

Bringing together the sociology of religion and the sociology of health, we ask how authority over life is negotiated and distributed across governance frameworks, clinical settings, and everyday practices, and how moral repertoires are reconfigured in emerging domains such as artificial intelligence. We welcome conceptual and empirical contributions, including (but not limited to);

• AI and the moral governance of emerging health technologies
• Faith-based and secular framings of AI in health and care
• Assisted reproductive technologies and religious responses (e.g., IVF, surrogacy)
• Social uses of genetics and genomics (e.g., testing, editing, ancestry, enhancement)
• Religious meaning in reproductive or genetic treatments
• Gendered experiences of biomedical technologies and access to care
• Genetics, religion, and reconfigurations of the sacred, personhood, and human dignity
• Other emerging biotechnologies and bioethical frontiers